


blue, yellow, and rust

by alderations



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Dissociation, Fluff, Hair Braiding, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, beach day gone wrong, canon-typical threats of violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-16
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:35:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26491276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alderations/pseuds/alderations
Summary: A nice beach vacation, Brian said. Time in the sun, just the nine of them—well, eight, unless they managed to drag Nastya along. Sand and warm water and all the good stuff. So many of the crew had never even seen a beach before, he couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces.He has long since eaten his words.
Relationships: Drumbot Brian/Jonny d'Ville, polymechs
Comments: 17
Kudos: 174





	blue, yellow, and rust

**Author's Note:**

> cw: descriptions of a dissociative episode

A nice beach vacation, Brian said. Time in the sun, just the nine of them—well, eight, unless they managed to drag Nastya along. Sand and warm water and all the good stuff. So many of the crew had never even seen a beach before, he couldn’t wait to see the looks on their faces.

He has long since eaten his words.

When they’d been selecting a destination, Brain and Ashes looked for a place with warm, sunny beaches, somewhere they could relax and kick back and… long story short, they found a planet advertising a balmy 25 degrees year round, perfect for any vacation! It was only upon arriving, and seeing how overwhelmingly furry the planet’s inhabitants were, that they realized their mistake. Somehow, of all the worlds in the vastness of the universe, they’d found one that measured temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.

So now the nine of them stand shoulder-to-shoulder on sand that’s more frozen seaweed than anything else, watching sheets of stinging rain hit the molten-grey water that stretches out into the horizon. Even Nastya is here, coaxed out by the prospect of sunbathing like a lizard, but she has long since subsumed Jonny into her billowing coat to leech his body heat. Brian, meanwhile, is doing his best to pretend that the cold doesn’t bother him, much less the way the stars blink through the rolling clouds overhead, as the rain seeps through the cracks in his metal plating and drips off the brim of his hat. The only one of them who remotely seems to be  _ enjoying  _ this beach is the Toy Soldier, who appears to be oblivious to the cold and the misery of its crewmates as it squats in the sand and inspects a trail of footprints from one of the tiny shorebirds sprinting up and down the waterfront.

“Next time,” Ivy starts, “I might suggest—”

“Don’t,” Ashes interrupts her.

Ivy rolls her eyes and forges on. “In the future, you should  _ perhaps  _ consider including your archivist in these decisions. There’s a ninety-four percent chance that I would have noticed the discrepancy in units  _ before  _ we made landfall.”

“Would you have actually stopped us?” asks Brian.

She just shrugs.

“Well, at least we know who to blame. I’d shoot you if it didn’t mean taking my hands out of my pockets,” Tim grumbles. “It’s not even that bloody cold! If it weren’t for the fucking rain—”

“It  _ is  _ that cold,” Nastya hisses through gritted teeth. She’s practically vibrating in place, her body desperately trying to make up for the heat lost to her quicksilver blood.

Brian sighs and looks around, taking stock of his crew. Everyone except the Toy Soldier is shivering; even Raphaella’s wings shake as she wraps one around Marius and tugs him into her side to share his warmth. Ashes eyes a pile of driftwood a ways down the beach, as if there could possibly be any hope of setting it alight in this weather. “Shall we just… turn around and go back to the ship, then?”

“Aurora’s doing some internal maintenance,” Nastya replies through lips that area quickly turning grey. “She requested to be left alone for at least a few hours. I already told you that, Brian.”

That she did, though Brian’s having a hard time recalling much of anything through the fog in his head right now. “Great. Any other suggestions?”

The Toy Soldier starts pacing back and forth across a few meters of sand, following a pair of birds that squeak angrily and run away every time it approaches. “I Quite Like These Little Fellows!” it announces.

“I say we let it take up ornithology while the  _ rest  _ of us get a cup of coffee and wait it out,” Jonny suggests, his voice muffled through the lapels of Nastya’s coat. “Patronize local business and all that.” Everyone turns to stare at him. “What? I wasn’t suggesting that we  _ pay  _ them or anything, just spend some quality time.”

So they leave the Toy Soldier with its new bird friends—sanderlings, according to Ivy’s inner field guide—and head for the tiny café in the strip of grass between the beach and the nearest road. It’s more of a bait shop-slash-concession stand than anything else, but they have coffee that Ashes pays for in counterfeit coins and a table big enough for eight people to squeeze around. As the others sip their drinks and pout in silence, Brian stares down at his hands, studying the way the condensation gathers at his fingertips as the warm air inside the building struggles to reconcile with his frigid surface. There’s a pressure growing behind his eyes that he doesn’t know how to deal with, that feels like a headache but instead tells him  _ you don’t need any coffee, you’re not like them, you should be fine.  _ While the others start to perk up and pick fights over sugar packets and holes in their gloves, Brian sits with that pressure, listens to it, studies the way it wells up in his throat like it’s threatening to drown him.

They get kicked out, of course. Jonny must be in a great mood, since he doesn’t shoot anyone or really cause that much of a ruckus, outside of threatening to skin everyone in the establishment and turn them into rugs. He includes his crewmates in this statement. He also hasn’t left the shelter of Nastya’s coat this whole time, staying glued to her side, which seems to be a boon to their collective mental well-being. If he were a better man, Brian would feel relief on their behalf, instead of a sharp and bitter envy.

When they find the Toy Soldier, it’s fake-crying because it hasn’t managed to catch a single sanderling, and it  _ really  _ thought that they would make Such Fetching Little Pets. “We have octokittens on the ship,” Tim grunts, his face making it quite clear that he doesn’t understand why anyone would rather have another pet when they could have an octokitten instead.

“They’re Not The Same,” the Toy Soldier wails.

Ivy rests a hand on its rigid shoulder. “I’ve already taken several pictures of the birds with my brain, TS. When we get back, I’ll help you whittle one, okay?”

In an instant, it stops pretending to cry and stands up straight, bouncing on its feet. “That Sounds Delightful, Miss Alexandria! Let’s Away, Then! Tally Ho!”

“At least it’s easy to please,” Ashes sighs as it skips back in the direction of the landing pad where Aurora is parked.

The ship is dark and quiet when they return, but she thrums to life the second Nastya’s shivering hand makes contact with the wall.  **Back so soon?**

“We made a… miscalculation,” Nastya admits, smiling up at the ceiling.

**I would never complain about having you aboard, my dear. The others, however…**

Jonny scowls. “Rude. I keep your girlfriend warm with the sweat off my own brow—”

“Ew,” Nastya grouses.

“—and all I get is a spaceship complaining about me? I should’ve left you on that beach.”

Brian pushes them forward a bit, just so that everyone has room to actually enter the ship, and the hatch can close behind them. “But you didn’t, so now you get to deal with Aurora bullying you. Can you stop blocking the hallway?”

Still grumbling under his breath, Jonny disentangles himself from Nastya’s coat and marches off in search of some unspeakable violence to whet his appetite. Ivy and the Toy Soldier chat animatedly about the various plumages of migratory shorebirds on their way to the library, while Brian nudges Marius out of the way and heads for the bridge. He needs to be alone. He needs to be in the pilot’s chair, where he’s supposed to be, until the chill in his metal skin settles into equilibrium with the burning cruelty that claws back at it from the inside.

Once the door to the bridge is closed behind him, Brian lets out a shaky breath. The pressure in his head has reached a crescendo, leaving him frozen in place as if every movement is pushing through a wave of static made physical as he slogs his way toward his chair and drops himself into it. It’s impossible to stay still, but when he taps his fingers on the armrest and flicks his eyes across the control panel, that’s almost enough. Besides, his legs aren’t going to move again any time soon. Part of him wonders if the tightness in his chest has to do with his human heart—the one vulnerable part of him, the part that  _ should  _ be able to feel, but his mechanism has always been just as capricious as the body he once had. He closes his eyes. He is unmoored, set adrift without the grounding touch that would be so much stronger if he weren’t fucking  _ made of metal.  _ He opens his eyes again, and there are only stars.

There have only ever been stars.

Some part of his mind—the one that screams at him to get up and snap out of it—tells him that the tears streaming down his cheeks mean something, but that meaning refuses to form words that would make any sense to the Brian caught in the network of stars neverending in front of him. He’s so  _ cold.  _ Even when he was out in the wind and the rain, he barely felt the cold, but now it creeps up his fingers and numbs his face and spears his heart as if the frigid void is finally coming back for what it rightfully owns.

Behind him, the door swings open and someone clears their throat.

Brian makes a valiant attempt to speak, but he’s not sure that he even manages to open his mouth. Still, knowing that someone else is here, even if he really did want to be alone moments before, forces the cold to abate by a few inches.

“Are you just going to mope in here all night, then?” It’s Jonny, gruff and insensitive as ever.

With a momentous effort, Brian turns his head away from the observation window, to find Jonny’s wild hair shoved in every possible direction by the goggles pushed up on his forehead. In the light from the hallway, he looks like he has the evil version of a halo. Brian would laugh at that if he could.

Upon getting a look at Brian’s face, Jonny’s eyes widen and he crosses the room to stand next to the pilot’s chair. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Brian croaks.

Jonny studies his face for a while, not bothering to pry open his emotions when he knows that Brian won’t be able to talk much. Still, any distraction from the stellar expanse in front of them is a welcome one, and Brian would much rather take in the way Jonny’s eyeliner is smudged across his cheeks where he teared up in the cold. “Can I help?”

That’s a novel sentiment, coming from him. “I guess,” Brian manages, finally turning his body to face Jonny more fully, just because the invisible hand squeezing his heart lets up just a bit when they’re this close. “I’m… cold.”

“Yeah. So am I,” Jonny huffs sardonically. “Thought you didn’t get cold, though?”

Brian just shrugs, because he has no idea how to explain what part of him is cold. It’s not like he knows. “I’m just cold.”

After another moment of contemplation, Jonny reaches out a hand and waits for Brian to take it. When he does, Jonny’s skin is strikingly warm. “It’s not good for you to sit around staring at space all the time,” Jonny grumbles. “C’mon. Let’s go warm up.”

As hard as it was to walk on his own, Brian finds it a bit easier to follow Jonny through the winding halls of the Aurora until they reach the common room. It’s empty at the moment, with everyone else probably warming up or napping after freezing their asses off on the beach, so Jonny just falls into the middle of the sofa hard enough to make the cushions bounce, then pushes Brian down onto the floor in front of him.

“What—what are you doing?” Brian asks, untangling his metal limbs and slowly gathering himself from where Jonny basically dropped him.

Jonny rests his hands on Brian’s shoulders. “Your hair got all fucked up from the wind, and I know you’re not gonna want to shower, so I’m braiding it for you. Stop looking at me and turn that way.”

Surprise keeps Brian from answering for a few minutes, while Jonny combs his fingers through his hair far more gently than his words would suggest. He has to hope that the copper filaments aren’t shredding Jonny’s skin, or at least that he’d say something if they did. Once Jonny works out the worst of the tangles and starts splitting his hair into chunks, Brian speaks up. “I don’t really feel temperature all that much.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“But I—I—I don’t know what happened. I guess I… there’s some part of me that… when it gets cold enough, I feel like I’m—like I’m back in—it’s… I don’t know how to—”

Jonny tugs a strand of his hair just hard enough to make Brian pause, then drags a blanket off the back of the sofa and tosses it across Brian’s shoulders. “You don’t have to explain it. Give it time.”

“I guess,” Brian mumbles. He  _ wants  _ to explain it, just so that he understands what’s happening on his own behalf, but he also knows that it’s not going to happen. “It just. Hurts.”

The hands on his scalp are more grounding than he would’ve expected, as Jonny gathers more and more of his curls and twists them into a single braid. “Yep. And that’s why having feelings is the worst thing in the universe, and everyone else should just follow my lead and carve those bastards right out of their chests.”

Brian shakes his head, only for Jonny to stop him with a firm hand on his brow. “You’re not fooling anyone, d’Ville.”

“Shut it.”

They carry on in silence for a bit, Jonny braiding with a precise intricacy while Brian slowly leans into his touch and, even more slowly, starts to thaw. His brass body being as conductive as it is, he was physically warm within minutes of returning to the ship, but the overwhelming numbness inside his chest is starting to soften, too. By the time Jonny finishes braiding, Brian is leaning back against his legs and relishing the unspoken affection in Jonny’s every touch.

Then he holds the back of his hand up like a mirror, and… feelings aside, it’s a very nice braid. “Since when can you do  _ that?” _

Jonny scoffs and stares up at the ceiling. “When Nastya was first mechanized, there were some, uh, issues with her blood. Like, clotting. Y’know, cuz mercury doesn’t have fucking platelets or whatever? I used to braid her hair for her so it didn’t get too fucked up whenever Carmilla was working on her.”

“That sounds awful,” Brian mutters.

“Meh. It’s Nastya, she dealt with it.” He pats the sofa next to himself, then opens his arms once Brian crawls onto the sofa, so the Drumbot can fall into his lap. “Any better?”

Brian thinks for a second, his face pressed against Jonny’s shirt collar. “I feel like I’m here.”

“That’s something,” Jonny agrees.

At that moment, the door swings open, revealing a wild-eyed Gunpowder Tim with a gun in each hand and a nasty bruise forming on one cheek. “Aw, are you cuddling without me?”

“You weren’t invited.”

“That’s rude,  _ First Mate.”  _ Tim tosses the guns onto the end of the sofa, then throws himself down on top of Brian, only to let out a pained  _ oof  _ and slide onto the floor, because landing full-body on top of a large metal object hurts. “Ashes got sick of setting me on fire, so I came to see if either of you wanted to do some violence to each other. I can settle for snuggles, though.”

Brian honestly wouldn’t mind being sandwiched between Jonny and Tim. “You’re welcome to—”

“Wait, who did Brian’s hair? That looks  _ lovely,  _ you should put a flower in it! You and the Toy Soldier could match!” Tim sits up straight and picks at Brian’s braid until Jonny swats his hands away.

“I did it, because his hair was disgusting. Far too gross for flowers.”

Tim’s eyes go wide enough to see the uncovered circuitry at the edges, and then he starts bouncing up and down in place and backs up to the edge of the sofa, tipping his head into Jonny’s lap. “Do mine! Do mine!”

Jonny just sighs and resigns himself to a night of painful domesticity.

**Author's Note:**

> ok first of all: thanks to the tumblr anon who suggested hair braiding hurt/comfort! that was the initial impetus for this, and then it FINALLY got cold enough for me to engage in my favorite activity (fucking around on the beach in Wildly Inappropriate Weather), and I needed to write about it. I've read other fics about Brian having Lost In The Cosmos Flashbacks and other people have definitely described the concept far better than I did here, in part because I......had a panic attack about something really dumb and was like "welp might as well ride the wave and write it directly Into the drumbot" and here we are. (this was only after a few hours of grounding techniques and just generally feeling Awful, but I'm ok now and I curbed my Bad Decisions before they got out of hand and yeah.)
> 
> if you got this far, thank you for reading & I hope you liked this!!! pls leave a comment if that's a thing you're wont to do? it makes me very happy. i will absolutely take more prompts like this one on [tumblr](alderations.tumblr.com)!


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